Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-07: A God Falls Where Magic Fails

Previous reviews note important aspects missing, some here:

Overly complicated skill challenges with weird scaling
Class-based skill checks please don't
Missing Survival check DC that impacts final fight

I played this first CP 21

Fighter 9
Cleric of Jaidi 9 plus Vibrant Thorns spell
Bard 9 focussed on debuffing
Rogue 10
Monk 7

Vibrating the oozes left me in tears of laughter when the rogue had to do the job.

Important fight with lots of Reactive Strikes rendered hilarious by the cleric moving around healing with a Vibrant Thorns spell active. The debuff bard disrupting everything else.

I was concerned about the final fight but it never posed a problem.

GM scenario with CP 13

Rogue 7
Sorcerer 8
Inventor 9
Magus 9 with psychic dedication

I used an NPC to encourage the PCs to extend themselves in the skill checks as per GM discussion on this scenario.

A NPC group has a powerful ability but IMHO not powerful enough to justify their backstory.

This scenario is a missed chance to be an awesome high level repeatable. Any little bit of the blob could return ... more logical than making 6-03 repeatable, which is set 2 weeks after Godsrain.

A repeatable could feature different NPC parties to fight against, different environmental effects from the Mana Wastes, different blobs from Huge to Gargantuan, different mythic powers etc.

A NPC group shows up only once in the scenario. What if they don't give up, continue to sabotage the group that wins, ambush in the final fight, a 3-way or 4-way stand-off depending who wins when? The narrative shouldn't bend to benefit the PCs all the time, if the PCs have a setback, NPCs can remind players they are masters of their own destiny.

A creature statblock has a tag that has no mechanical effect. This is disappointing.

Remember that 15' range increment means a maximum range of 150', triple random routine too fiddly though, recommend generating random numbers in advance.

Biggest disappointment, and why this scenario gets 2 stars from me:

This scenario could have been a final swansong to Gorum. One final glorious battle against many opponents for our Lord in Iron. A last fight to frighten the non-Gorumites and inspire previous worshippers of Gorum. At appropriate opportunities in the final fight I made sure with action and words that my players knew who they were really fighting.

Feels like 2 adventures smooshed together and cut down into 1.

Starts with a skill challenge with no Challenge Point Scaling, but with 6 player scaling. And it's weird scaling that requires 50% more success points. But with the way its set up multiple characters give you more opportunities to have the key skills but not more opportunities to make checks, meaning that if you say had 6 Valeros's you'd need 50% more successes, but you wouldn't actually get any more checks. So 4-5 higher level characters are going to have a much easier time than 6 lower level characters.

There's also weird overly wordy/misleading descriptions on how this challenge works.

After that is a combat with 9 stat blocks for each tier, (one shared).

Depending on Challenge Points you use the following combinations of stat blocks.

CFMRV
DGMSV
DFGMSV
DFGMRSV
DGGNSSV

With Hightier being

1234V
5634V
52634V
526348V
566788V

Ugh, such a pain to prep.

Also mechanics that care about the class of PCs. WTF. Nothing else in the game works like this and it shouldn't. Giant Frown here.

Of course even if you lose the combat it doesn't matter storywise even though it makes no narrative sense, it'd be sad to send everybody home early.

Followed by the Optional Encounter(s).
Do you have time? Roll a d6 and encounter something, maybe don't encounter something. Still have time? Do it again. Still have time? Well stop doing it now, we don't want too many encounters. Didn't have time at all? Well get the rewards anyway. So if you have time you have to win an encounter or get lucky, but if you're slow, get all the rewards anyway.

No map or guidance provided on tactics or motivation. Minimal scaling (Basically only at max CP, and it's just HP). Probably didn't want to commit too many words or maybe was a late addition after playtesting revealing that if you skipped any interesting RP with the first challenge you could complete it in about 15 minutes, and these extra encounters are to entertain/punish a table like that?

I don't know, the motives are inscrutable to me.

Why are there a bunch of different encounters here? Why are we rolling? It's an old school wandering monster table. They have their uses, like when you want to demonstrate an area's unsafe to limit time spent.

All that said, the adventure functions. There are no serious errors that make it unplayable. Should quite possibly be 3 stars but the class based mechanics and overly detailed/under detailed scaling, really make me unhappy.

Overall I liked GMing this scenario! It has a decent amount of skill checks and roleplay, one could argue too many but it didn’t tie up my table too much. It could help if the players got some sort of ping if they pass the max threshold of points. The combats were okay but not terribly challenging. We played at high-tier and my biggest criticism probably comes from the boss being too easy. The entire scenario sets up the boss to be a big threat that has taken down several parties before yours. Maybe because my players had some good ways to capitalize on its common weakness but it never really got to show off what made it such a big deal in the first place

Another scenario this season that should have the repeatable tag. A minor tweak here or there and this could easily be repeatable and fun!

Overall it was very enjoyable to GM this one. The final boss could use some work with the way the hazards trigger but other than that I enjoyed it. Great set up.

Make it repeatable.

I have only played this one so far. I'll update my review after I GM it.

For me the highlight of this scenario was one of the battles. It is not that often one gets to fight against opponents with interesting personalities. Also helpful was the fact that my GM really roleplayed the opponents well.

I found that encounter to be interesting and innovative, and I appreciate the work that went into developing it. The skill check portion was also interesting, though I can see how it might be a bit long. I suspect the final fight might be very challenging for some parties but it wasn't too bad for ours...So I really won't comment much on that.

Also on the positive side, this one seemed to run a bit short. Compared to some of the recent marathons (which are great scenarios, mind you, just long) this one felt refreshingly snappy.